describing - providing a systematic description of a system, its dependencies and place in the bigger world e.g. avoiding the classic “law of unintended consequences”

communicating - having a visual representation is a good way of promoting communication and debate and often easier to understand than tabular or straight text (Mk1 Human seems to be highly evolved for visual information processing)

integrating - following on from the above it provides easy ways of involving the various domain experts to distill the knowledge into the one model or architecture description

Eclectica Systems has been involved in (enterprise) architectural modelling for many years now having been involved with the MoD before the MODAF (MoD Architectural Framework) came into existence and subsequently with the Integration Authority (IA - now the SEIG) Architecture Lab at Malvern. This has involved modelling of diverse things such as

large naval platforms such as Astute or land platforms such as FRES

C4I systems such as RNCSS, JOCS, JC2SP

the definition of the makeup of the Recognised Air Picture (RAP) and Recognised Maritime Picture (RMP) - in order to then understand and evaluate the systems that work with or impact on these

national and technical standards and their dependencies - for project standards review

In more recent times we’ve been producing architecture descriptions as graphs using the Neo4J graph database to enable better and easier querying / use of the model content and the relationships to extract meaning and results.